Beyond the “American Dream”: Democracy and Economic Citizenship in the Second Gilded Age ALICE O’CONNOR PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA Abstract In this paper I consider how the “two Gilded Ages” construction can be useful by drawing attention to the contrasts between the late 19th and the late 20th-century as key moments for recognizing and moving issues of economic and social inequality to the forefront of the policy/political agenda, and as moments of political opportunity for framing a broadly inclusive public debate about what a more just and equitable economy looks like, and how it can be achieved. As a time that brought questions of wealth, inequality, and democracy so starkly to the fore, the first Gilded Age proved critical in this regard, opening up new, ultimately more democratic ways of thinking about the meaning of economic citizenshipWORKING and its implications PAPER: for reform. DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE WITHOUT PERMISSION DEMOCRACY AND MARKETS UNDERSTANDING THE EFFECTS OF AMERICA’S ECONOMIC STRATIFICATION A TOBIN PROJECT CONFERENCE, APRIL 30 – MAY 2, 2010 WORKING PAPER: DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE WITHOUT PERMISSION Beyond the “American Dream”: Democracy and Economic Citizenship in the Second Gilded Age ALICE O’CONNOR PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA Though many decades in the making, the growing inequality that has come to characterize the U.S. economy has only more recently begun to gain traction as a serious problem in need of political redress. Now-familiar references to ours as a “new” or “second” Gilded Age are especially significant in this regard: in calling to mind its “first,” late 19th-century counterpart (a period roughly spanning the late 1860s through the early 20th century), they bring historical and normative meaning to trends that are more often presented in narrowly economic terms.1 And in this they remind us that the prospect of deep and permanent economic division raises concerns that go beyond the shocking extremes of income and wealth distribution to the very question of who we are, what we aspire to, and what we can legitimately claim to represent as a democracy. WORKING PAPER: DO NOT CITE OR In this paper I considerCIRCULATE how the “two GildedWITHOUT Ages” construction PERMISSION can be useful in another way as well: by drawing attention to the contrasts between the late 19th and the late 20th-century as key moments for recognizing and moving issues of economic and social inequality to the forefront of the policy/political agenda, and as moments of political opportunity for framing a broadly inclusive public debate about what a more just and equitable economy looks like, and how it can be achieved. As a time that brought questions of wealth, inequality, and democracy so starkly to the fore, the first Gilded Age proved critical in this regard, opening up new, ultimately more democratic ways of thinking about the meaning of economic citizenship and its implications for reform. These broad reframings, as we can now recognize in historical perspective, would reverberate for decades through the New Deal and early post World War II years in debates about more incremental social policy changes as well as in bolder system-changing reform proposals and social movements. Although hardly radical or even deeply reformist in its outcome, the conversation they shaped was far more O’Connor | Beyond the “American Dream” Draft – do not cite, quote, or circulate without permission 1 wide-ranging than any that seems imaginable today. The dramatic “return” to Gilded-Age levels of inequality in the late 20th century, in contrast, has thus far yielded a far more modest and at best sporadic political and public response. Pitched in the timeworn language of “saving” or “reviving” the American dream, recent initiatives from both parties have revolved around the promise of economic growth and individual opportunity through some combination of “middle class” tax cuts and expanded access to homeownership and higher education.2 Even such boldly (and briefly) stated goals as cutting poverty in half, remain stuck in the “us” helping “them” framing of the issues rather than considering the shared nature or the redistributive implications of the problems they seek to address. They tend to rely on familiar incremental tools to lift incomes above a minimal line without imagining alternatives to the existing structures of opportunity, distribution, or political power.3 Viewed in historical perspective, then, the contemporary political debate—or lack thereof—about inequality underscores the degree to which the entire axis of economic policy and debate has come once again to revolve around assumptions of limited government, market dominance, and individual rather than collective responsibility for basic economic security. In highlighting the contrast between our own and an earlier era of inequality, the two Gilded Ages construction challenges us at the very least to broaden the parameters of public debate, on the one hand by shifting the ground from the facts to the underlying values of political economy, and on the other by pushing beyond the narrowed vision ofWORKING economic citizenship PAPER: captured DO in NOTthe contemporary CITE OR rhetoric of a highly individualized AmericanCIRCULATE dream. WITHOUT PERMISSION To be sure, the idea that we are in a second Gilded Age draws attention to economic inequality as a defining fact of our time—inequality marked, as in the first Gilded Age, by extraordinary and newly visible concentrations of income and wealth at the very top, if not (at least within the U.S.) by the mass concentrations of extreme poverty made visible in documentary studies such as Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890). But the concept of a second Gilded Age also points to dimensions of inequality within the broader political economy that cannot be measured in terms of wealth concentration alone. Indeed, until very recently, what one historian referred to as a “Mount Everest of inequality”—the peak point for measured income and wealth concentration—was 1928, just before the extraordinary stock market bubble of the 1920s burst, but well after the era named for its outsized and gilded fortunes had passed. In 1928, the share of income among the top 1% reached O’Connor | Beyond the “American Dream” Draft – do not cite, quote, or circulate without permission 2 23.9 percent, and came to 5.04 percent for the top .01 percent. By at least one measure that peak has since been passed: in 2007, the share going to the top .01 percent reached 6.04%, while the top 1% garnered 23.5 percent of income.4 Wealth in the first Gilded Age was not only remarkable for being visibly concentrated and maldistributed, however. Wealth, in the guise of “capital” or “big business,” was also emerging as a powerfully organized and increasingly consolidated if not yet fully corporate political force.5 Personified by such celebrities of industry, commerce, and finance as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan, and Jay Gould, wealth made its presence felt in Washington as an “interest” that, while by no means unified on all issues, on defining matters of political economy such as the gold standard was willing and able to speak with one voice and, as in the election of business-friendly Republican William McKinley over populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan in 1896, with massive amounts of campaign cash.6 Equally striking in the eyes of contemporary and subsequent observers was the degree to which organized wealth had law and politics on its side. Nowhere was this more evident than in what, until very recently, was the emblematic Gilded Age Supreme Court decision, in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886), conferring upon private corporations the legal status of natural “persons” entitled to the equal protection provisions of the Fourteenth amendment. At the time and subsequently,WORKING that decision PAPER:was all the more DO significant NOT asCITE the culmination OR of two decades of jurisprudence inCIRCULATE which the constitutional WITHOUT protections meant PERMISSION for newly-freed slaves had been used far more aggressively on behalf of individual—and henceforth of corporate—property rights. Nor did the extension prevent the courts from upholding a whole host of racially restrictive property rules. The Gilded Age, after all, was also the era of legally sanctioned Jim Crow. More recently, the Santa Clara decision has been joined by the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), recognizing corporations and unions as individuals with first amendment rights to free expression and overturning a century of legislative and judicial precedent to recognize their right to spend money directly on behalf of candidates for political office. In calling the decision “dramatic,” “extreme,” and even “backward,” dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens made special note of how the majority opinion went out of its way to tilt the scales of constitutional protection toward already-powerful economic interests, and in a way that “may well promote corporate power at the cost of the individual and collective expression the First Amendment was O’Connor | Beyond the “American Dream” Draft – do not cite, quote, or circulate without permission 3 meant to serve.” But Stevens hearkened back to Gilded Age jurisprudence to offer a more dire warning of the decision’s significance, quoting an earlier dissenting